Watch: Opening Night at 'The Normal Heart' on Broadway

Broadway.com sent a reporter to opening night of the revival of The Normal Heart, Larry Kramer's landmark play about the AIDS crisis, and grabbed brief interviews with cast members Ellen Barkin, Joe Mantello, John Benjamin Hickey, Jim Parsons, Mark Harelik, Richard Topol, and Luke Macfarlane, as well as co-directors Joel Grey and George Wolfe, and Kramer.

Watch, AFTER THE JUMP...

Watch: Larry Kramer's 'The Normal Heart' Opens on Broadway

Had a chance the other night to see a preview of the revival of Larry Kramer's groundbreaking 1985 play The Normal Heart about the early days of the AIDS epidemic and was moved beyond anything I was prepared for. It's hard to single out a 'best' performance from this ensemble, though if I had to use one-sheet-style adjectives for the performances I'd call Joe Mantello "committed", Jim Parsons "hilarious", Lee Pace "stunning", and John Benjamin Hickey "gut-wrenching".

The show opens tonight and I thought I'd post an interview with some of the stars, as well, as the leaflet which Kramer has been personally handing out with a few assistants outside the theater after each performance. Click to enlarge.

For those of you who did not have the displeasure of coming out, or being out in the horrific time in our nation's history when the AIDS crisis began, you'll likely learn a lot.

In disclosure, the show advertises here on the site. I'd be giving it a rave in any case.

Check out the video, AFTER THE JUMP...

News: Chris Evans, Kelly McGillis, Nigeria, iPhone

A NYC Maternity shop gave lesbian customers a 10 percent discount yesterday: “Women make 77 cents on the dollar still. When two women are leading a household, they’re not making as much money as a married couple.”

Chris Evans films more scenes as Captain America

Kelly McGillis on her public coming out: "Fundamentally, I was just tired of lying about who I am. I’ve reached a point where my kids are grown, they’re out of the house, they no longer have to be concerned that their friends, their friends’ families, will put them in compromising emotional situations because of my sexual preference. That was a big concern of mine because, unfortunately, a lot of people are not very tolerant. I got to a certain age and I didn’t give a s— anymore.

Gabrielle Giffords' condition is improving.

One of the things that helped build the case against a student charged in the Tyler Clementi case was his deletion of posts on Twitter: "It can help demonstrate that your virtual behavior, online activities, are just as important, if not more so, than everything you do in your everyday life."

Listen: Britney Spears‘ "Till The World Ends" official remix.

First AT&T, then Verizon. Now the iPhone might be now be on its way to T-Mobile.

Openly gay Reverend Rowland Jide Macaulay to re-open House of Rainbow, the only gay church in Nigeria: "Religion is a backbone to life in Nigeria, so we all want to go to church," he says. "But we don't want to lie to God about who we are."

Art: Photographing the deaths of televisions.

This is how one resident of Brooklyn's Columbia Street Waterfront District describes his neighborhood, which has the highest concentration of same-sex households in NYC: "(it) is not the epicenter of gay culture.”

Beyoncé strikes a pose in Paris.

LGBT group Fairness West Virginia hires its first staff member.

Former Sony chairman Norio Ohga, who helped develop the CD, has died.

Larry Kramer on the current generation of gays: I don't know why so many gay men don't want to know their history. I don't know why they turned their back on the older generation as if they don't want to have anything to do with them. I would like us to get beyond that."

Larry Kramer: Obama a 'Do-Nothing' on HIV and Gay Issues

In a World AIDS Day interview with the New York Daily News, Larry Kramer talks about growing older with HIV, pharmaceutical companies, the non-search for a "cure" for AIDS. He also rips President Obama.

Said Kramer to the NYDN: "Mr. Do-Nothing Obama will say today ‘Lets think of all the poor dead people’- or ‘let’s honor all the dead’ instead of fighting for the living.  He has been really useless in terms of both HIV and gay issues. An exceedingly large disappointment to me, how useless he has been.  He is simply not a leader. He may be president, but he is not a leader."

Watch more of Kramer's interview, AFTER THE JUMP...

Larry Kramer To Release 'The American People,' An Examination of U.S. Gays Past

Leave it to seminal gay activist and writer Larry Kramer to achieve the impossible: strike a two book deal.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux publishing company announced today that it will publish Kramer's latest tome, The American People, about the history of gay people on the North American continent, in two volumes. He insists, however, that his payment was "only six-figures:" "The days of the $8 million publishing deal is over."

Kramer's contribution to American gay history, meanwhile, has just begun...

Larry Kramer: Barbra Streisand a Hypocrite on Gay Rights

Following Wednesday's ruling striking down Proposition 8, Barbra Streisand released this statement of support:

"With this judge's decision, we are closer to the day that all people will have access to the same fundamental rights. Hopefully, this remaining civil rights violation will soon be a part of our past and we can look to a future where all people will be treated equally under the law."

Streisand's statement really rubbed playwright and activist Larry Kramer the wrong way, enough so for him to post this searing response on the ACT UP forum:

"Barbra Streisand is a hypocrite. If she had made my play about AIDS, The Normal Heart, in 1986, when she first acquired the rights, only to sit on them for a full ten years without filming it, she could have done something for gay rights when we were really in the sewer of death. But no, she chose to go off and make such vitally important and classic movies as Nuts and The Mirror Has Two Faces. Barbra Streisand cares about gay rights as much as i care about spending a zillion dollars decorating a colony of houses in Malibu. As the mother of a son who is not only gay but HIV positive, she should be ashamed of herself.

Fortunately and at last, an exciting movie version is now being prepared by openly gay director-producer Ryan Murphy to star Mark Ruffalo. i hope it will prove that the best thing that happened for The Normal Heart is that Barbra Streisand didn't make it.

I think it is important for all her many gay fans around the world, which certainly had once included me, to know the above.

Note: Kramer sent a correction regarding the earlier, incorrect date.